Did someone annoy Google?

[BernardSmith]

Until today, this discussion group was the first thing Google listed whenever I keyed in "Wine Making Forum". Now it's buried way down on the second page.... Just an FYI

 

[TJsBasement]

I'm sure you guys know vastly more then me about crawlers and web stuff but they love valid links to related information sites, like all the sellers be linked to the site too, they want it all connected, Matrix anyone. Like I said, my 2 cent is about worthless here but there you go.

 

[Sammyk]

Google is making a huge change and it has to do with Google Shopping. The ones that come up first will be the ones who pay the most money.
I am not sure if it applies to forums but I believe it does

Read more here: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y12/m05/i31/s00

 

[Runningwolf]

I'm sure you guys know vastly more then me about crawlers and web stuff but they love valid links to related information sites, like all the sellers be linked to the site too, they want it all connected, Matrix anyone. Like I said, my 2 cent is about worthless here but there you go.

tsk tsk..TJ your 2 cents is golden. Hey are you coming up north this weekend to Lake Erie?

 

[ibglowin]

The Google seems to be working for me! Numbers one and two with a bullet as they say thanks to MY!

 

[Sammyk]

That is because Google is looking for content, quality content. I also have many articles that come up in the top slot in search...

 

[TJsBasement]

Hey are you coming up north this weekend to Lake Erie?

Nope, gotta work Sat then a graduation party Sat night, and something else I think?

I'll be missing your party this time.

 

[JSPL]

Google serps often times fluctuate, especially when making changes as Sammyk referenced. I just checked 5:30pm Chicago time and www.winemakingtalk.com/ is number one while www.winemakingtalk.com/forum/f5/ (the beginners forum) is in the number two spot.

 

[Wade E]

It may have been because we had a text link on here that we just KO'd.

 

[djrockinsteve]

In April Google made many changes to how it ranks websites/forums. Bottom line they are going after good quality content and pushing back those who are trying to cheat the system and be on page 1-2 etc.

I believe it was called Penguin Update. A few weeks ago there were additional tweaks.

 

[GrandpasFootsteps]

Google builds a profile of each searching user automatically if you have an account and are still logged in. An "account" could be a YouTube login, a gmail login, or else just cookies enabled. The search engine uses the profile to deliver search results that are more in accordance with the results you have selected in the past. When you search "cute vampire wombats" you will get different result than I will get. More than likely my first few pages will be Wikipedia links since I click on Wikipedia links from my Google search results more often than other destinations. There are many other factors at play to determine what your personal search results are.

If your search results suddenly change, I wonder if (1) you deleted your cookies, (2) are using a different computer, (3) are using a different browser, (4) were assigned a new dynamic IP address by your ISP, or (5) have been cheating on us and not visiting WMT often enough.

The aforementioned link about "pay for top results" only applies to the google shopping results which are on the right sidebar and in the colored box of "preferred results" atop the typical search results.

Also the previous post about the recent change to forum (and blog) handling may affect results. Google put in some logic to defeat the "content farmers" which are fake journalists that blog or otherwise write articles copied from other data and consolidated on one site just to generate ad revenue. Some of these are massive and have many employees that get paid based on the number of articles they write. Sometimes they will write 100+ crappy articles per day just to get more of google's search results to link to that site.